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The Tortured Mind Of Dan Harmon

Are you watching Rick and Morty, one of the funniest, most outrageous shows on TV? Millions of die-hard fans are. So why are they making the guy who created it so miserable?

“I'll go, ‘I ate a cupcake today,’ and they're like, ‘Stop eatin’ cupcakes and write the fuckin’ show, you piece of shit!’ ” Dan Harmon rants, exaggerating only slightly the kinds of tweets he gets from “15-year-olds.” In Harmon's rants, his fans—equal parts acolyte and troll—are always 15. And they are always demanding more Rick and Morty.

But right now, his hit show isn't in production. At the moment, Harmon is on a stage inside his Burbank studio, taping a new episode of his podcast Harmontown, venting about yet another thing he's said that's caused yet another frenzy. “It can be challenging, especially with crippling lazy alcoholism, to write a show that hasn't been ordered by a network,” he snarked back at one of those fans two days ago. It spawned a litany of “Rick and Morty in limbo” headlines this morning—all because, Harmon says, this generation lacks the shame to shut up.

“America, can't you stop fucking commenting on everything?” Harmon shouts to the citizens of Harmontown who come to hear their self-appointed mayor give them shit, doing all this commenting just to get his attention. (I will later find this out for myself when I pop up in one of Harmon's Instagram videos, where I'm welcomed with “Who's that bitch?” Harmontown TripAdvisor rating: two stars, would not recommend.)

In defense of those 15-year-old assholes, any delay in Rick and Morty seems inexplicable, so it must be Harmon's fault. You probably first heard of Dan Harmon from his beloved, perpetually endangered NBC sitcom, Community, where he garnered an unusually devoted following for a showrunner—then articles, then a pink slip, after he had his crew chant “Fuck you, Chevy” at Chevy Chase during a wrap party, then played a Harmontown audience the voice mail where Chase berated him for doing it. This earned Harmon a reputation: Difficult. Tormented. Forty-five-year-old asshole.

But Harmon bounced back with the thing he's being hassled about now: Rick and Morty, the Adult Swim show that wrapped its third season as TV's most popular comedy among millennials, besting even just-leave-it-on juggernauts like The Big Bang Theory, capturing the Zeitgeist in a way not seen since South Park.Rick and Morty’s success is as unlikely as Harmon's rebound—a crude, nihilistic cartoon about an alcoholic scientist and his naive grandson wreaking havoc across space-time, from a writer with a reputation for his own vodka-fueled tyranny. And while it might be more famous for a fan base that seems to be birthed from the darkest id of the Internet, the show's even earned prestige, becoming what Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss tell me is “our generation's most powerful exploration of what it means to be a person in this universe.”

Not bad for what started as a vulgar Back to the Future parody that Harmon's creative partner, Justin Roiland, first drew for Harmon's L.A. film festival, Channel 101, way back in 2006. Six years later, when Adult Swim approached Harmon just after he was fired from Community, he turned to Roiland, who suggested they revive the characters. This time they would be grandfather and grandson.

Rick and Morty's dysfunctional world was rounded out with other family and an ever expanding cast of bird-people, sentient farts, and a top-hat-wearing sausage-shaped guy named Mr. Poopybutthole. Somehow, Rick and Morty makes you care about all of them. (Especially Mr. Poopybutthole.) Meanwhile, the acerbic, alcoholic scientist/grandfather Rick drags Morty across alien terrains and through dimensional portals, using superpowered intellect to dick around the multiverse, too in love with his own genius to care about the damage he's inflicting on his loved ones, or entire civilizations.

Still, Rick practices a sort of breezy misanthropy you can hang with. In one episode, he invents a sentient robot whose sole purpose is to pass the butter; when it's overcome by existential dismay, Rick shrugs: “Welcome to the club, pal.” In another, Rick unleashes a love potion that ends up infecting the entire planet; when he realizes he can't fix it, he simply pulls Morty into a parallel reality. As Morty mourns the world they just destroyed, Rick urges him not to dwell: “What about the reality where Hitler cured cancer, Morty? The answer is, don't think about it.” In moments like these, Rick and Morty spoofs sci-fi tropes to dive into our deepest, darkest cosmological questions—who are we? why are we here? what do we owe to each other? why don't you fuck off?—with both middle fingers extended.

Roiland, who describes himself as “more like a Jim Henson type,” is Rick and Morty's weird idea man and the one who voices both main characters. He is a free-associating “yes and” of a person, a fast-talking counterbalance to Harmon's perfectionism and his reluctance to accept “good enough”—a phrase Harmon associates with just giving up.

“That ‘good enough’ concept is very nuanced. It's something I've been talking to my therapist about,” Harmon says. “I need to form a new neural pathway that allows for ‘good enough’ the same way someone would to quit smoking or drinking. My brain just hits this wall. Like, Oh God, they're going to find out I'm a charlatan. I don't know how to write. But the only way they could find out I was a charlatan is if I didn't turn in a script.”

It's likely Harmon spends more time than any other writer—at least those I have met; certainly more than I do—thinking about writing. That obsessiveness is what gives rise to Rick and Morty fans analyzing the show through the prisms of philosophy and quantum physics. It's also what causes them to yell at him for taking too long to write it.

Harmon breaks down every script to a “story circle,” a simplified version of Joseph Campbell's “The Hero's Journey.” Here is the story circle for Dan Harmon's life, which he draws for me: Our hero bides his time masturbating in Milwaukee until he is called to adventure in L.A. He wins and loses Community. He attains true power with Rick and Morty. He faces down the fact that, although he's very good at TV, it will never make anyone like him. He learns to play jazz clarinet. He dies.

A more accurate drawing of Harmon's process might be an endless spiral. Harmon cheerfully tells me that one of his favorite methods of self-sabotage is to start at the path again and again, ceaselessly polishing a first scene. (Even with the story circle of his life, he starts over four times.)

There are deeper issues to consider, Harmon says: his clinging to work by way of wresting control over what Campbell calls the “impersonal cosmic force” rip-roaring through existence. Repeatedly, Harmon tells me his retirement fantasy—some day in the future when he'll be “finished” and can finally be a decent person. Until then, only his own genius can dictate his happiness.

“My therapist said, ‘You're sitting on this script because this is your last chance to be the curator of your own misery before moving on to what normal humans do, which is let the universe give them their good luck,’ ” Harmon says. “Self-destruction is a control freak's way of monopolizing their own fortune. It's gotta be the most narcissistic thing to hijack God's cockpit and go, ‘No, I'll decide whether it's a good day or a bad day.’ ”

“There's a lot of Dan in Rick,” Roiland agrees when I note that this sounds similar to a certain other God-defying narcissist. “A lot. It's gotten so bad that since season two, I've accidentally started calling Dan ‘Rick.’ There's definitely a world of difference between them. But Dan does—maybe subconsciously, maybe purposefully—tap into some of the darkness he's got in him.”

There's a lot in the show's fans as well. “I think he attracts very like-minded people who have a creative itch or feel socially isolated, and see someone that has a voice that maybe they don't have,” says comedian Patton Oswalt, a frequent Harmon guest star. On Rick and Morty, that voice is a drunken, nihilistic howl into the abyss. “If God is dead, then Rick and Morty is his funeral,” Harmon tells me. And at least some of its success can be explained by the way it echoes what so many are feeling right now.

“Community was a show that said, ‘Everything human is better than everything that isn't human,’ ” Harmon explains. “Rick and Morty says, ‘You're going to be tempted to believe that being human is important, and that is going to cause you to suffer.’ ” The flip side, Harmon says, is that “Rick is constantly saying to an inferior humanity, ‘Look, this is as good as it gets. So every day should be Rick Day, which is like a million Christmases. You're never supposed to be denied anything.’ ” In other words, we're all just fumbling around in the dark here. Grab whatever you can.

Watch:

Dan Harmon Breaks Down the Biggest 'Rick and Morty' Moments Ever

Unfortunately, some fans have taken Rick Day to a real, Black Friday extreme. Chances are, you've heard about them: Last year, based on a throwaway gag about Szechuan dipping sauce, a short-lived McDonald's promo for the 1998 movie Mulan, McDonald's promised to bring the sauce back in select stores, drastically underestimating how many people would actually show up. Twitter was quickly awash in footage of shouting protesters, and a guy in a Rick and Morty shirt hopping on a counter, screaming catchphrases at fry cooks. This came only weeks after several women on the writing staff were harassed online by male fans who blamed them for a perceived decline in quality. It's the kind of hostile, entitled behavior that nerd echo chambers breed, only a few degrees of mob rule away from grabbing tiki torches and barricading yourselves around Confederate monuments. Harmon was forced to denounce those Reddit goblins in interviews: “I loathe these people.”

Along came the think pieces: “Horrible Rick and Morty Fans Demonstrate How Not to Be a Fan.” Google began auto-completing “rick and morty fans” with “are the worst.” A meme mocking a stereotypical fan's condescending tone (“To Be Fair, You Have to Have a Very High IQ to Understand Rick and Morty”) came to define them: Self-important. Probably sexist. Definitely obnoxious. Asshole, 15, just discovered Nietzsche. And sucking all the enjoyment out of the show.

“It's a huge bummer,” Harmon says. “Do I worry about them ruining everything? Yeah, I do. Once the title of your show becomes a way of describing a demographic, that is toxic.”

Nevertheless, he and Roiland insist these people are a small subset. The worst of them—the ones who see Rick as a role model—are missing the point.

The day afterHarmontown, inside his shrouded, modestly rambling home in the L.A. suburb of Los Feliz, where the stars rest between podcasts—celebrities like Aimee Mann and Kate Micucci are neighbors, he says—Harmon's grappling with what feels like everything but Rick and Morty. There's something necessitating a meeting with George Clooney. (Or someone from his office, at least.) There's something involving Daedalus, the classical myth about a guy who becomes so engrossed by his own ingenious creations that everyone around him suffers. (Would you believe the story really resonates with Harmon?) There are myriad other scripts in development, whose specifics I'm not at liberty to divulge, except to say Harmon slumps under their added weight when each is rattled off.

And there is today's ordeal, a limited-series adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan, which has sat dormant more or less since it was announced in 2017. Harmon's racing to produce a script by tonight, before he lets everyone down again. We had activities planned, but Harmon needs to work. Was I just supposed to watch him write, or…?

So I've been watching him—typing and tugging at his graying beard and not masturbating—for the better part of the day. The lull of '90s female alt-rock (Liz Phair, Fiona Apple, lots of Tori Amos) from Harmon's Spotify is broken by the barking of his bulldozer goldendoodle, Harvey, who keeps trying to hump me, and Harvey's little buddy, Nigel, who also likes to watch. Harmon and I haven't spoken since this morning, although he'll occasionally throw his arms up and sigh things like, “Logic!” Sometimes he paces while acting out filler dialogue. (“Well, you're a piece of shit”; “No, fuck you.”) During one of these spells, he wanders off. I page through two books carefully arranged on a table next to me—Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein: The Story of the Making of the Film and Melody Beattie's The Language of Letting Go: Daily Meditations on Codependency—until he finally returns, carrying a tumbler with his own face on it. He pours vodka from a bar cart and silently resumes typing.

Harmon's face is everywhere, actually, peeking out amid some surprisingly sexy Community and Rick and Morty fan art in the hall and from a stately portrait over the front-room bar—not to be confused with the old-timey banquette-lined bar upstairs, with the sign reading “McHarmon's Tavern: Follow Your Bliss.” (Harmon's sole Emmy, for co-writing a Hugh Jackman musical number at the 2009 Oscars, sits among the vermouth.) A Harmon above the toilet, sprawled coyly on a sofa, watches you pee.

Yet another Harmon has been watching me watch the real Harmon all day, peering out from the one-sheet for Harmontown, the 2014 documentary that followed Harmon on tour with his eponymous podcast, at the peak of his post-Community-firing self-destruction/self-actualization. That was the moment he became not just Dan Harmon, showrunner, but Dan Harmon, object of cult worship, a guy whom people will literally watch do anything—even type for six hours. In fact, having a captive audience there as he works, hanging on every moment of his process, might just be Dan Harmon's ideal.

It's 6:45 P.M. when Harmon finally finishes his Vonnegut script, the end of an eight-hour marathon of typing and self-flagellation he concludes with a muted “I think I finished.” He sends it to his manager, and the reply contains several exclamation points, as close to celebration as we're going to get. Harmon has 15 minutes to get to the studio and tape yet another podcast: Whiting Wongs, his irreverent exploration of race with Rick and Morty writer Jessica Gao. In a Lyft, I ask what freedom looks like to him.

“The headline is not owing people stuff, not disappointing people by holding things up,” he says. “Freedom means being able to ask the question: What do I feel like doing?”

But the ultimate freedom, he says, would mean not doing anything.

“If I found a billion dollars under a rock tomorrow, I would disappear for sure,” Harmon says. “That's all anyone wants to do, just hang out! Why are you imposing yourself? Why don't you just hide? If I ever felt like I was secure, I would do a bunch of stuff for fun. You'd hear about me starting a festival in the desert. But the truth would be I had finished and I was pursuing my bliss.”

“If I found a billion dollars under a rock tomorrow, I would disappear for sure. That’s all anyone wants to do, just hang out! Why are you imposing yourself? Why don’t you just hide?”

Harmon indulges in this fantasy a lot: vanishing, not being beholden ever again to Twitter or executives or George Clooney, “following his bliss.” And yet, what he does can't be motivated by money alone. Certainly no one's giving him a million dollars to trundle back to Burbank after a grueling day of writing so he can cop to his white privilege for 90 minutes. Last night, he welcomed Grown-ish writer Kara Brown to Harmontown to discuss the unfair showbiz domination of guys like himself. This is also typical of Whiting Wongs, in which Harmon, Gao, and guests—tonight it's Silicon Valley star Jimmy O. Yang—“solve” Hollywood's racism. Here, Harmon is open, self-deprecating, and not really profiting from it. Rather, candor is his currency, an accounting of his failings that secures his place in this universe.

Obviously, it can also get him in trouble. After Whiting Wongs wraps, we decamp to Harmon's favorite bar—a dank hole with conversation-destroying music—to talk about the downsides of honesty. Chevy Chase is apparently pissed at Harmon again—this time over a New Yorker profile of Community breakout Donald Glover, in which Harmon was quoted saying Chase had expressed “jealousy” of Glover. Harmon says he wouldn't use “the J-word” and that the quote was “Frankensteined” together. (The New Yorker maintains it was “a direct quote.”) Still, the fight is back in the headlines.

“Ever since the Chevy voice-mail thing, the sensation of having a scandal or feud with another person really makes me sick to my stomach,” Harmon says, sighing.

Then there was Harmon's brush with Hollywood's #MeToo-led moral reckoning. In January, former Community writer Megan Ganz called Harmon out on Twitter, alluding to past harassment. What followed was remarkable after a year of so many half-assed mea culpas. Harmon offered an unhesitating apology for abusing his power. A week later, Harmon apologized again, this time with an unflinchingly specific detailing of how he'd made unwanted advances on her, told her he loved her, then wanted to “teach her a lesson” for rejecting him. Harmon made no excuses for having “treated her cruelly” and undermining her faith in her talent. He owned up to having had a lack of “respect for women on a fundamental level” and berated himself for getting away with it “by not thinking about it.” He pleaded with his fans—his worst impulses made manifest in their own harassment of his staff—not to hurt Ganz, to try to learn from this. “We're not gonna get away with it anymore,” he said. On Twitter, Ganz called it “a master class in How to Apologize.”

“Say what you will about Dan Harmon, I can't ever see him getting blackmailed,” Oswalt says. “Everything is laid right out there. Like, ‘Hey, you did this horrible thing.’ ‘Oh yeah. I know. I talked about that in episode 4 of my podcast.’ ” (Harmon's apology to Ganz is actually in episode 272.)

Harmon handled it the way he handles everything: out loud, in front of strangers. It's the way he handled his divorce (episode 167) and the complicated relationship he has with his parents (too many episodes to name). It's how he's confronted the estranged brother who called him a lazy piece of shit and hasn't spoken to him in 12 years. It's where he works out his guilt about his sister, born with the rare neurological disorder Rett syndrome, which has left her institutionalized for most of her life. “I feel like I was born a criminal,” Harmon tells me. “With a karmic credit card that's maxed out.” He says these things in hope of staving off inevitable retribution.

Harmon talks a lot about the need to be “safe”—his perpetual fear of being noticed and exiled from the kingdom, or off another TV show. Ironically, Harmon's method of avoiding detection has always involved standing out: putting on magic acts for his parents' dinner parties, sitting behind a desk for mock talk shows at every holiday, seeking refuge in anonymous laughter and applause, playing Chevy Chase's drunken voice mails. It's his “clown act,” Harmon says, knocking himself before anyone else can.

“I can’t ever see him getting blackmailed. Everything is laid right out there. Like, ‘Hey, you did this horrible thing.’ ‘Oh yeah. I know. I talked about that in episode 4 of my podcast.’ ”

Now that we're three vodkas deep, I pose his fantasy to him again. What if, right before moving to L.A., he'd stumbled upon a downed plane in the woods with millions of dollars spilling out of it, A Simple Plan–style? Would he really rather be free to hide, knowing no one would ever know his name?

Harmon considers this carefully.

“The 22-year-old version of myself would be like, ‘No, I'm destined to redeem humanity with my work,’ ” he says finally. “He doesn't understand that fame means nothing. He doesn't understand that those tokens don't translate into anything. You don't realize how boring that would become.”

He may be honest, but I'm not sure I believe him. Because it's the fame that gives him what he needs most: The audience. The 15-year-old assholes. All those strangers, the only people he truly connects with. That's where he cashes in his tokens. You can see it on Twitter, where Harmon offers up avuncular wisdom to kids suffering from depression. I see it myself after Harmontown, when he spends 30 minutes mentoring a young fan all the way in from Florida. And I hear it on my recorder, which I leave on the table while I go to the bathroom, later discovering that Harmon has asked the women sitting next to us to leave “a satanic secret message” for me.

“When you come back, we're going to slit your fucking throat,” one of them says.

“Oh fuck!” Harmon laughs, sounding exactly like Rick. He's having fun now, delving into the darkness with strangers. In that moment, he couldn't be happier.

Except, of course, if Rick and Morty were renewed.

“Rick and Morty is the highest creative opportunity you could ever be afforded as a writer. It's an infinite sandbox,” Harmon says. “It's the perfect show. It's the most important thing I've ever done. I only want it forever.”

And this is why, as we speak, there's no fourth season of Rick and Morty yet. It's not Harmon's mouth, or fights with Roiland, or the worst of his fans, or because he hasn't finished the script, the cupcake-eating piece of shit. Even Turner Entertainment wants more of the incredibly lucrative show; when I asked why it hasn't been renewed, the network responded, rather contradictorily, “It has, but we're still in negotiations.” Harmon and Roiland say they're holding out for a contract that grants them immortality. Or, if immortality is unavailable, at least “many, many, many more seasons,” and enough money so that, as Roiland says, Harmon “doesn't have to take 12 other jobs while we're working on season four.” That way, Harmon can give Rick and Morty the full attention it deserves. To be able to follow his bliss, without taking on a dozen other tortures-for-hire.

As we're leaving, Harmon gets a text from the Vonnegut producer, which he reads in a tone just shy of a positive cancer diagnosis: “I was quite impressed and thrilled. I really felt you guys handled this masterfully.”

I don't see the problem.

“I know! It's crazy,” he says. “But I wrote that shit with a GQ guy watching me, and now…” He shrugs. “It's like the Devil's oven.”

It's late and we're drunk, and I don't know how to convince him that “thrilled” is a compliment. So Harmon begins walking home. He abruptly turns back.

“I don't want the article to be like, ‘This guy can't be happy,’ ” Harmon calls out. “I'm so happy. All you've got to do is tell the magazine how happy I am, and then I'll be happy.”

When I talk to Dan Harmon again, nearly two months later, he isn’t just happy. “I’m ecstatic,” he tells me. Rick and Morty has been officially picked up for 70 episodes—not immortality, exactly, but an eternity in TV time. Long enough that Harmon and Roiland can focus on doing what they want without driving themselves crazy. Long enough that their jobs now have the unfamiliar ring of security. (And the promise of syndication.) All those other assignments that once weighed so heavily on Harmon can now be minimized, wrapped up, maybe even withdrawn from completely. There’s no more agony about saying no—or even worse, yes—to journeyman side projects. No more worrying about owing people anything, except this show that he loves above all else.

“I can finally actually breathe and be as excited as I’ve wanted to be,” Harmon says. He might even be able to get home by sundown.

Needless to say, this is exceptionally good news. Needless to say, Harmon regards it warily.

“I definitely agree with my therapist that I’m a very lucky guy,” he says. “One of the last biggest problems I’m gonna need to solve about myself is my ability to process happiness. How can I respond to good news without assuming I’m going to catch a disease?”

As it happens, Harmon is just coming off a debilitating bout of shingles, a little warning flick of God’s finger that Harmon spent days railing against, Job-like, on Twitter. But in today’s rare moment of zen, he’s already laughing it off as a teaching moment about stress management. The impersonal cosmic force is still tearing through the universe, doling out renewals and viral infections indiscriminately. So now Harmon, says, he just has to learn to be grateful for the good fortune it sometimes bestows. He just gets to enjoy the work.

Which, of course, leaves only one question: Why aren’t you writing the fucking show right now, you piece of shit?

“We need coffee brewed at the office,” he laughs. “That’s the reason now, instead of ‘I can’t talk to you about it,’ and ‘I don’t know if it’s ever gonna happen,’ or I can’t even think about it because I’ll go insane.’ From now on, the reason I’m not writing the show will be because I’m done writing it for the day, and I’m having fun. That’ll be nice.

That’s the feeling, I say. The “good enough” feeling.

“Yeah,” Harmon says. “It really makes you think you’re about to get cancer.”

Sean O'Nealis the editor of The A.V. Club.

This story originally appeared in the June 2018 Comedy issue with the title "The Tortured Mind of Dan Harmon."